A fine portrait of a young Gentleman

He wears dark blue coat, buff coloured waistcoat and tied white cravat
set in the original gold frame with bright-cut edge within plaited hair border secured with gold buckle at the base of the portrait
the reverse with gold monogram JMP on plaited hair studded with gold stars set withing bright cut- mount, blue glass and further gold bright cut border.

Walter was the elder brother of the miniaturist Charles Robertson. Around 1784 he went to London and was practising there for the next few years. He did not, however, exhibit at the Royal Academy or elsewhere, and nothing is known of him during that period. Returning to Dublin he was in 1792 made a bankrupt, He had become acquainted in London with Gilbert Stuart, and when Stuart went to America early in 1793, Robertson accompanied him, both sailing in the same ship.
Robertson, who was known as "Irish Robertson" to distinguish him from the two Scottish miniature painters, Archibald and Alexander Robertson working in America at the same time, gained some notice by his miniature copies of Stuart's portraits; but his career in America was probably not very successful, for he left that country in 1795 and made his way to India.
Although Robertson held for some years a leading position in Dublin as a miniature painter, considered, as Pasquin tells us, "as the first professor of his department of the arts in Ireland for several years," his work is now quite unknown

Comerford Collection at the Irish Architectural Archives in Dublin, in 2009.